I fear him less, however, on your account than I do the other one who possesses all the aristocracies of nerves and mind, and who is an intellectual and refined epicurean as the former is a brutal and scientific one. How dreadful to encounter this dainty nihilist, and yet how he abounds! At twenty-five he has run the gamut of all ideas. His critical mind, precociously awake, has comprehended the final results of the most subtle philosophies of the age. Do not speak to him of impiety or of materialism. He knows that the word “matter” has no precise meaning, and beside he is too intelligent not to admit that all religions have been legitimate in their time. Only, he has never believed, and he never will believe in them, any more than he will ever believe in anything whatever, except in the amusing play of his mind which he has transformed into a tool of elegant perversity. The good and the bad, beauty and deformity, vices and virtues are to him simply objects of curiosity. The human soul so far as he is concerned is a skillful piece of mechanism in the dissection of which he is interested as a matter of experience. To him nothing is true, nothing is false, nothing is moral, nothing is immoral. He is a subtle and refined egotist whose whole ambition, as that remarkable analyst, Maurice Barrès, has said in his beautiful romance of “L’Homme Libre”--that _chef-d’œuvre_ of irony which lacks only conclusion--consists “in adoring himself,” and to acquire new sensations. The religious life of humanity is to him only a pretext for these sensations, as are also the intellectual and the sentimental life. His corruption is otherwise as profound as that of the voluptuous barbarian; it is differently complicated, and the fine name of dilettantism with which he adorns it, conceals its cold ferocity, its frightful barrenness. Ah! we know this young man too well; we have all wished to be in his place, for we have been so charmed by the paradoxes of too eloquent teachers; we all have been like him at some time. And so I have written this book to show you, who are not yet like him, you child of twenty years, whose soul is in process of formation, what villainy this egoism may conceal.